CERN Might Have Broken Light's Speed Limit: Not!

* Insects, Arachnids, and the Speed of Light & Flight: Real Science Radio co-hosts Fred Williams and Bob Enyart discuss locust wings creasing for flight along their veins, and about tarantula feet equipped with nozzles to shot out Kevlar-strength silk to avoid falls, and about the European researchers who claimed, and then later retracted, breaking the speed of light by shooting neutrinos 450 miles from Geneva to Sasso, Italy.* Locust Wings are WAY More Sophisticated than Expected: According to Creation magazine's Fall 2011 issue, the reason that designers of mini flying robots have not been able to demonstrate good aerodynamics even after imitating the size and shape of flapping insect wings is because, according to research from Oxford, insect wings deform along their vein structures to add flight control. Wow! Cool God!* Tarantulas' Different Need, and Perfect Foot Design: First it was Kevlar-strength silk. Then it was cross-linked glue molecules to catch insects. Now it's nozzle-equipped feet. Real Science Radio has enjoyed talking about the amazing design features of spiders. Now, Creation magazine reports the latest research that shows that tarantulas have many nozzles in the bottoms of their eight feet that shoot out super-strength silk to help stabilize themselves on slippery surfaces because while other spiders are rarely injured in falls, these relatively heavy tarantulas get severely injured even from relatively minor falls.

2012 Update: The claim has been retracted and attributed to a lack of quality control (at a miniscule level). As RSR reported at the time:

* Researchers at CERN May Have Shot Out Neutrinos Faster than Light Speed: The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) this week published a report about neutrinos they shot out of a particle accelerator at faster than the speed of light, from near Geneva, to a lab in Sasso, Italy 450 miles away, with an arrival time 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light. (To extrapolate to help us visualize the speed difference, traversing a distance that photons would cover in 21 days, these neutrinos would arrive about an hour sooner.) Bob and Fred discuss this possibility, and talk about the starlight and time problem for Big Bang atheists and about a biblical answer for the Christian's starlight and time question.

* LOOK WHAT THE LORD HATH WROUGHT! This stunning animation comes to us from the anti-Darwinist intelligent design folks over at the Discovery Institute.

* Bob & Fred Suggest the BEL Science Store: If you enjoy the science you hear about on our fast-paced RSR radio shows, you'll really love the books, audio, and DVD science materials in our online store's Science Department! The KGOV September Telethon is 9% toward it's goal of $20,000 in donations and purchases from our store, and $20 per month pledges! So, please help keep RSR airing and online for another year by shopping in the KGOV Store, getting a BEL monthly subscription, making a one-time donation or a monthly pledge to RSR and Bob Enyart Live!

Eugenie Flubs Genetics Prediction, Bob Hits the Bull's-Eye: Eugenie Scott offered the "evidence" for evolution of Junk DNA. This scientist, from her Darwinist worldview, made a philosophical argument that a Creator would not fill our DNA with mostly junk. (Unlike the relatively few gene segments that code for the 20,000 proteins in the human body, the widespread evolutionary claim of the 1990s was that the rest of the genome had no function and so was called Junk DNA.) Bob, the Christian fundamentalist, answered from his biblical worldview, that our knowledge of genetics was in its infancy, and that it was too early to make the determination that all those non-coding segments of DNA had no function. The next decade of explosive genetic discoveries overwhelmingly validated this creationist perspective, so much so that aside from coding for 20,000 proteins, it is estimated that the remainder of the genome has approximately one million other functional regulatory segments of DNA. So much for junk. Fulfilled predictions, as the world saw with Einstein, go toward scientific credibility. However, Dr. Scott strongly rejected this creationist prediction making an extraordinary claim, which Bob immediately offered her to retract, that scientists currently knew everything they would ever need to know about genetics to conclusively state that all those regions were useless junk. Bob would love a rematch. But Eugenie Scott, (Ph.D. in Physical Anthropology, leading anti-creationist, and director of the National Center for Science Education), who had just debated evolution on a nationwide PBS television program, ended this one-hour program with Bob stating, "Well, I don’t debate."

* No UFOs, No Aliens: This list is based on Gary Bates' best-selling DVD Alien Abductions and UFOs – Exposed which has ranked as high as an Amazon.com Top 50 Best-seller! 1. No two UFOs are ever alike2. We've never seen them entering our atmosphere (they're always already here when they're seen).3. They change shape; they morph. How can nuts and bolds spacecraft do that?4. Aliens walk through walls.5. Aliens arriving was thought up in the 50s & 60s and since then we've learned how enormous the Universe is, and just to get across our Galaxy, even at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years, so the nuclear physicist aliens would have to teach their children to be physicists, and that next generation of aliens would have to teach their children, and so on, and so on, and...6. Spacecraft travel problems:- Energy requirements: 98 atom bombs for 500 grams to get to half the speed of light.- At half the speed of light it would take four million years to reach Andormeda, the closest Galaxy.- 100k dust particles for every cubic kilometer whereas one spec of dust, at a 10th the speed of light, is like 10 tons of TNT exploding on your craft.- A .2 mm paint flake hit the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983 and it cost $50,000 to repair the damage to the windshield.7. 9Gs could kill an airforce pilot. "Warp speed" would be millions of Gs. Make it so.8. Cosmic Radiation could kill you. Einstein's relativity indicates that it would require a virtually infinite amount of energy to get your ship to the speed of light. That's why sci fi hopes for wormholes, etc.9. UFOlogists are big on IDH which is the Interdimensional Hypothesis claim that aliens don't have bodies so they don't need spacecraft.10. Some UFOlogists claim that String Theory's multiple dimensions perhaps they refer to spiritual dimensions but God is spirit and He made spirit beings (angels) and endowed humans with a spirit, and all these persons dwell in only one spiritual dimension.11. UFOs materialize and dematerialize and defy the laws of physics as they accelerate toward the ground and do a U-turn.12. Markers of the Classic Abduction Syndrome (CAS) include there is a capture and there may be an examination, telepathy, a tour of the ship, and they may take a journey, then return and experience aftermath symptoms of interference.13. Apparently, thousands of ETs fly billions of light years, then they lie about why they're here, they kidnap people at night, and what, they're here to fix global warming?